Tunnel Vision; When School's Out, the Subways Can Turn Ugly

Remember back in high school, when the bell rang, the doors opened and the halls flooded with humanity -- including, inevitably, that group of kids who lorded over the lockers, trying to impress each other by making everyone else miserable and scared? (Maybe you remember this from another perspective.)

One afternoon last week, a similar scene unfolded near Lincoln Center, except that the bell was a two-tone electronic one, the doors were stainless steel and the corridor ran between the seats of a No. 1 train. The sense of menace, however, was exactly the same.

The subway car was already crowded with silent commuters, heading north, seemingly insulated from the indignities of high school. But at the 66th Street station, a group of about 25 students from Martin Luther King Jr. High School, their academic day behind them, poured into the car and proceeded to take it over.

A basketball appeared. A tall kid wearing a terry cloth headband started to dribble it. The ball was stolen and chest-passed half the length of the car, where it almost landed in the lap of a 30-year-old accountant with a cup of coffee. Another kid caught it, but in doing so he rammed into the accountant, and coffee splashed on her coat. An elderly man sitting next to her came to her defense, screaming at the kid with the basketball to ''Hey, cut the'' something that cannot be printed in this newspaper.

The boy with the basketball and three or four of his friends stopped and began to repeat the man's angry phrase mockingly. One fake-punched at the elderly man's face. A group of girls from the high school watched from nearby, like a Greek chorus, and when one girl yelled, ''This ain't no playground, y'all,'' everyone, including the girl who said it, found this incredibly funny and screamed with laughter.

The accountant, her face red, tried very hard to render herself invisible. ''It's like being back in high school again,'' she said. ''It's horrible.''

The 66th Street station might be the most extreme example in the city -- it sits at the confluence of students streaming from three high schools, M.L.K, Beacon and La Guardia -- but it is only one of dozens of subway stations where, every weekday at about 3:30, a kind of brief, intense mass-transit phenomenon occurs.

The average age of the subway rider plummets. The decibel level rises, and along with it the level of frustration, anger and sometimes even fear on the trains. Anyone over the age of 18 has basically two choices: try to disappear like the accountant or return to high school, in a sense, like the elderly man on the No. 1.

''If you push me, man, I'm gonna knock your head off,'' said Emile Durant, 43, a messenger who was trying to get out of a No. 9 train last week at 66th Street and found his passage blocked by a group of students crowding on, shoulder to shoulder.

Mr. Durant has delivered blueprints to an office near 66th Street twice a week for the last year and a half, and he nearly always ends up in shouting matches with people less than half his age. He has lost his sense of embarrassment about this.

''Together, they're strong,'' he said Thursday, still seething. ''Divided, they're nothing. And they know that.''

Of course, it's not just the post-adolescent population that can feel intimidated during the high school subway flood. In fact, other students say it is even scarier for them because they are more often the direct targets of bullies from their schools. And they say that the increased police presence around student-heavy stations often strangely backfires.

''These guys know nobody can do anything to them, 'cause the cops are right there,'' said Sandra Covarrubias, 14, a freshman at the Beacon School. ''It makes them braver, like a dog on a leash. They know there's a line nobody can cross.''

Sometimes, though, as the subway rumbles under the city, that line is crossed.

As the No. 1 train headed north last week, some of the tall boys began to taunt and threaten Gus George, a spindly homeless man with long, curved fingernails and no front teeth who says that he lives in terror of teenagers.

By 86th Street, Mr. George, 45, was backed into a corner. He began to bellow like a bull. He began to swing at boys who jumped out of the way of his fists. Then he began to preach, like a reincarnated Old Testament prophet.

''You know what you're looking at when you're looking at me?'' he asked. ''An example. I'm your example. I'm what you're going to be if you keep this up. I scare you, don't I?''

And then, as if to underline his point, Mr. George reached into his dirty blue nylon jacket and pulled out a sharpened letter opener, which he aimed into the air as his tormentors backpedaled and several passengers screamed. ''You want a piece of me now?'' he asked.

Later, standing on the platform at 96th Street, still shaking from the encounter, he said: ''I wouldn't hurt anybody. But you better believe those kids would hurt me. This is New York City, the naked city. This is the coldest city on earth.''